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PACDEX Multimedia Gallery

Scientists, using the nation's newest and most capable aircraft for environmental research, launched a far-reaching field project to study plumes of airborne dust and pollutants that originate in Asia and journey to North America. The plumes are among the largest such events on Earth, so great in scope that scientists believe they might affect clouds and weather across thousands of miles while playing a role in global climate.

The PACDEX (Pacific Dust Experiment) project was led by scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research and Scripps Institution of Oceanography. NCAR's main sponsor, the National Science Foundation (NSF), provided most of the funding. The project continued for almost two months.

A. Video interview with V. Ramanathan of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography.

This April 15, 2001, NASA satellite image shows dust arriving in California from Asian deserts. Concentrations of dust are visible to the south, near the coastline (lower right of image); to the west the dust is mixed with clouds over open ocean. This dust event caused a persistent haze in places like Death Valley, California, where skies are usually crystal clear. (Image courtesy the SeaWiFS Project, NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center, and ORBIMAGE.)

This NASA satellite image, taken on April 30, 2005, shows a plume of dust flowing from China to the north of the Korean Peninsula and over the Sea of Japan.The dust almost completely obscures the island of Honshu from satellite view. Such plumes can cross the Pacific and scatter dust across the Western United States.(NASA images created by Jesse Allen, Earth Observatory, using data obtained from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) and Goddard Earth Sciences. (Image courtesy the SeaWiFS Project, NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center, and ORBIMAGE.)

This image, drawn from satellite observations, shows the movement of a particularly large dust plume from Asia to North America in 2001. The purple and blue areas represent no or little dust in the atmosphere; the yellow and orange areas represent a moderate to high amounts of dust. The image uses a scientific measure known as aerosol optical depth, which shows how much light in a column of the atmosphere is blocked by airborne particles. The observations were taken by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS), flown aboard NASA's Terra satellite. (Image courtesy NASA.)